Monday, October 4, 2010

It may not sound like much, but for the first time Monday we saw the first tangible sign of Georgia trying something to fix its woes.

The Bulldogs held a full-pad practice on Monday, which is normally reserved for special teams work and other minor walk-through stuff. Head coach Mark Richt answered “never” when asked how unusual it was to do so on a Monday.

“We hadn’t been blocking and tackling real good, so we decided to have a little spring ball today,” Richt said. “Normally we’re in shorts, running, getting a little running in, work on a few things. But we decided to put the pads on and get after it. One vs. one, two vs. two.”

Richt seemed pleased, calling it “physical” with “great competition.”

The players found out via text at 2 p.m. that the practice was going to be switched up.

“We’ve gotta do something different, to shake things up,” tailback Caleb King said. “It honestly was a good fun practice. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, more like this.”

King said that despite having to do sprints at the end of practice. That went for the entire offense, which “lost” a set of mini-scrimmages to the offense.

Cornerback Vance Cuff admitted that the rules were set up to favor the defense.

“They had to get a certain amount of yards and have to do certain things, and all we had to do was pretty much stop them at the beginning,” Cuff said.

Receiver Kris Durham, still dealing with a pinched nerve, was in a non-contact jersey. (He said he hopes to play Saturday.) But Durham also thought the padded practice was a good thing.

“It was a very emotional practice. You could tell everyone was getting after it. It was pleasing to see,” Durham said. “It was something that we needed. We needed to get more physical.”

11 comments:

Nathan
said...

I just wish that we would start to see our back-ups get more playing time. Vance Cuff got three personal foul calls in my opinion he needs to see much less playing time. Rambo has consistenly been soft, even worse I haven't seen anything positive jakar hamilton has done since his easy pick off in game 1. I'm not trying to call certain players out, but you think we'd be giving the back-ups more playing time. Obviously are starters aren't getting it done. I even noticed Ealey in on a 3rd and 13 an obvious pass down. I know for a fact 2 sacks against Arkansas were directly because of him and I'm sure there has been more. So why is he in there on an obvious passing down. Blows my mind

Good news that they are trying to right the ship. Funny how everyone are blaming the coaches. Strength and Conditioning is the problem, OC is the problem, CMR is the problem. Haven't heard many 'the players are the problem'. After all given that we have had all these high ranking recruiting classes the players can't be the problem. I see a O-Line that's struggling, no running game (this maybe due to the lack of an O-Line), no high impact D players, no big threat receivers (other than AJ) stepping up. I know the D is in transition, but you would think that a great player would find a way to make a play on D. You stick AJ (aka great player) and we score touch downs, pull AJ out and we do nothing. Pedestrian UGA team. Hmm, maybe recruiting is the issue.

Coaches are responsible for not only recruiting, but developing the talent once it gets on campus. If UGA doesn't have the talent or the impact players, the blame ultimately goes back to the coaches because they either can't evaluate talent, can't develop the talent once it arrives on campus, or a combination of both. Either way, the buck stops with the coaching staff.

Search Top Blogs...

Subscribe To

My Latest Tweets

Twitter Updates

About the Author

Seth Emerson has been covering the SEC and Georgia (on and off) since 2002. He worked at the Albany Herald from 2002-05, then spent five years at The State in Columbia, S.C., covering South Carolina. He returned to Athens in August of 2010, only to find that David Pollack and David Greene were no longer playing for the Bulldogs. Adjustments were made.

Emerson is originally from Silver Spring, Md., and graduated from Maryland in 1998 with a degree in journalism and a minor in getting lost on the way to practically everywhere. Then he spent four years at The Washington Post, covering small colleges, a couple NCAA basketball tournaments, and on one glorious day, was yelled at by Tony Kornheiser. It was probably at The Post that he also learned to write in the third person.

These days he lives in Athens with his beloved and somewhat wimpy dog, Archie. Together they fight crime at night in northeast Georgia, except on nights there is no crime, in which case they sit at home, sip on white wine and watch reruns of "Mad Men."